As we continue our time management series, graduate student William Pennock shares his thoughts. Like many of the topics we publish on, time management is an area that combines opportunities for practical growth and spiritual formation. Our goal is to encourage readers to steward the gift of time God has given us, using it to love God and others and live out Christ’s Kingdom. You can click here for the rest of the time management series.
personal statement
On Alert and On Call: Armed Only with His Mind and His Love
Inspired by a response to The Urban Resident‘s series on Christian Personal Statement and building upon my conversation with Mary Poplin regarding Is Reality Secular? Testing the Assumptions of Four Global Worldviews? (InterVarsity Press, 2014), I asked Mary to share a personal statement that describes her calling/vocation as a Christian professor in a secular university. May you find these words an encouragement as you seek the Lord’s insight in articulating, bearing the marks of, embodying the call to be a “little Christ” (i.e., an image-bearer of God) with academics as mission (i.e., a dialogical mission).[1] Thank-you Mary. To God be the glory! ~ Thomas B. Grosh IV, Associate Director, Emerging Scholars Network.
That your hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I say this in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments. — Colossians 2:2-4
Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience. — 1 Peter 2: 14-16
As a late convert to Christ, it has taken me a long time to get to where I could write a personal statement that describes my call (mind and heart) as a Christian professor in a secular university. Christ has given us His mind so that we may stay alert in our fields to the “plausible [but false] arguments†in the various theories and literature, which we read and assign. There is always some truth in secular theories, but there are also errors of commission and errors of omission. It is my job to introduce students to the widest range of literature on a subject (not just the ones currently in vogue) and help them understand and discern the various principles encoded therein. I also must be prepared to ask questions that will reveal the “plausible [but false] arguments†and suggest there are other ways to look at things. [Read more…] about On Alert and On Call: Armed Only with His Mind and His Love
Writing a Christian Personal Statement: Part 3
In today’s culture, there is no greater sin than to be a phony. Â No offense to the lawyers out there, but Holden Caulfield said it well:
“Lawyers are alright, I guess — but it doesn’t appeal to me”, I said. “I mean they’re alright if they go around saving innocent guys’ lives all the time, and like that, but you don’t do that kind of stuff if you’re a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides, even if you did go around saving guys’ lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys’ lives, or because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in the dirty movies? How would you know you weren’t being a phony? The trouble is you wouldn’t.†– Holden Caulfield, from The Catcher in the Rye
Perhaps the most difficult part of writing a personal statement is the beginning, that space in which you determine what you are going to write. I used to scoff at the idea of planning or pre-writing for personal statements. “It should be organic and authentic,” I would say to myself as I sat down in front of the blinking cursor, and I would proceed to type out anything that came to mind about career, life-goals, faith, aspirations, and ambition. It was terrible stuff and I inevitably found myself back at the blinking cursor on a blank page. For each personal statement, I must have found myself scrapping the entire thing at least six or seven times.
Certainly, good writing requires a lot of writing and re-writing; there is no shortcut to that. Â However, those applying to STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, math) who approach writing papers with a certain trepidation may feel especially handicapped. Â Even those who are grammatical and stylistic specialists find these aspects of the personal statement intimidating and may find themselves caught in a similarly frustrating cycle of edits that lack a sense of redeeming value.
What I found was that in wanting to sound authentic, I actually sounded like a phony. It seemed that the more honest and personal I strove to be, the more cliched and superficial my prose became. Â For whatever reason, it didn’t feel good enough to simply articulate what I wanted to become and why; I felt compelled to justify myself as well. In the many, many re-writes I did, I consistently noticed that my insecurities would bleed into my writing and that, though the expression of these was genuine and deeply personal to me, they sounded immensely superficial in retrospect (and to my external reviewers, editors, and admissions deans as well). The trouble was that, like Caulfield’s lawyer, the more I was concerned with not looking like a phony, the more trouble I had distinguishing myself from one. [Read more…] about Writing a Christian Personal Statement: Part 3
Writing a Christian Personal Statement: Part 2
My essay for admission to medical school was brutally honest. Â I talked about my low GPA, my relationship with my parents, my obsession with the problem of suffering, quotes from my personal journal, and how it was all driven by a radical faith in Jesus Christ (and images in my head of suffering children). Â It was my attempt at being really, really honest and was the product of many careful hours of meticulous revision. Note: Click here for Writing a Christian Personal Statement: Part 1.
It was also really, really bad. Â By this I mean that I was still admitted to medical school, but that the essay was so memorably bad that the Dean of Admissions actually mentioned it to me. Â During one of our individualized preparatory meetings he said, “When you write your personal statement for residency, you might want to consider making it less . . . religious than your last one.” Â I knew exactly what he meant.
I think a lot of my mistakes sprang from a sense of insecurity, both in terms of what I believed as well a vague sense of “calling.” Some of the anxiety and frustration in writing Christian personal statements came from the assumed notion that the degree to which I explicitly described my faith was the degree to which I had intensity, passion, and authenticity in my beliefs. Â And yet by definition, the process of applying to graduate school meant that I was contemplating major lifestyle changes. Â In my statement I wanted to communicate the intentionality, confidence, and idealism that I aspired to in anticipation of success, but in reality I was also writing from a place of insecurity and uncertainty. Â In the midst of this ambiguity in future planning and the imagining of myself in a variety of different futures, I had this desire to express my faith at the same time that I struggled with it on many different levels. I wanted to describe how important it was to me, but like any public demonstration of faith it became the imperfect expression of many conflicting and evolving emotions. [Read more…] about Writing a Christian Personal Statement: Part 2
Writing a Christian Personal Statement
Writing any application for a school can be difficult, and writing the Personal Statement can become the most challenging part of it. By the time you are preparing to submit an application, most of its elements are already fixed: your GPA, your MCAT or GRE scores, the activities you did (or didn’t do). The Personal Statement, however, is an open field of possibilities in self expression, and that sense of ambiguity lends itself to great liberty and/or great anxiety.
Admittedly, the title is somewhat misleading. A “Christian” personal statement shouldn’t technically be very different from any other personal statement. It still has to accomplish the same goals, which are fairly well defined in the context of applying for a graduate or professional school. As an example, an excellent source on the Medical School Personal Statement would advise you to focus on answering these questions:
- What have you done that supports your interest in becoming a doctor?
- Why do you want to be a doctor?
- How have your experiences influenced you?